In 1983, five years after Mead had died, Derek Freeman – a New Zealand anthropologist who lived in Samoa – published Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth, in which he challenged all of Mead's major findings. In 1988, he participated in the filming of Margaret Mead in Samoa, directed by Frank Heimans, which claims to document one of Mead's original informants, now an elderly woman, swearing that the information she and her friend provided Mead when they were teenagers was false; one of the girls would say of Mead on videotape years later:

Freeman had some kind of axe to grind else he had some sort of scheme to gain notoriety based on her fame. Back in the day I was up on all that stuff, I found it impossible to arrive at any other conclusion.

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After an initial flurry of discussion, many anthropologists concluded that Freeman systematically misrepresented Mead's views on the relationship between nature and nurture, as well as the data on Samoan culture. According to Freeman's colleague Robin Fox, Freeman "seemed to have a special place in hell reserved for Margaret Mead, for reasons not at all clear at that time".[25]

Moreover, many field and comparative studies by anthropologists have since found that adolescence is not experienced in the same way in all societies. Systematic cross-cultural study of adolescence by Schlegel and Barry, for example, concluded that adolescents experience harmonious relations with their families in most non-industrialized societies around the world.[26] They find that, when family members need each other throughout their lives, independence, as expressed in adolescent rebelliousness, is minimal and counterproductive. Adolescents are likely to be rebellious only in industrialized societies practicing neolocal residence patterns (in which young adults must move their residence away from their parents). Neolocal residence patterns result from young adults living in industrial societies who move to take new jobs or in similar geographically mobile populations. Thus, Mead's analysis of adolescent conflict is upheld in the comparative literature on societies worldwide.[27]

Freeman may well have received different information from his informants, and/or made different observations than those which Mead had made. But his conclusion that she was fabricating was both unnecessary, incendiary and apparently malicious. Two people of very different identity who do ethnography in the "same culture" at very different time periods--and in particular in a society which was changing as rapidly as Samoa was changing in the middle of the 20th century--are bound to come up with very different conclusions. Had Freeman not been a dick, he might have been able to reach that conclusion instead of accusing a dead woman of being a liar!

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Second, Freeman's critics point out that, by the time he arrived on the scene, Mead's original informants were old women, grandmothers, and had converted to Christianity, so their testimony to him may not have been accurate. They further argue that Samoan culture had changed considerably in the decades following Mead's original research; after intense missionary activity, many Samoans had come to adopt the same sexual standards as the Americans who were once so shocked by Mead's book. They suggested that such women, in this new context, were unlikely to speak frankly about their adolescent behavior. Further, they suggested that these women might not be as forthright and honest about their sexuality when speaking to an elderly man as they would have been speaking to a woman near their own age.[27] However all of the women concerned were already Christians at the time of their interviews as teenagers.[citation needed]

Mead certainly had her shortcomings, and flakiness. But hers and Boas work are quite simply the foundations for the last coherent version of American cultural anthropology. What came after them (post-Marxist and post-structural and post-modernist stuff) was quite simply tripe.

Supposedly Freeman was a sociobiologist and I consider myself an evolutionary psychologist so we are "of the same school of thought." But based on what I've read of his, his antagonist approach to cultural anthropology was unnecessarily dismissive and accusatory. It is arguably one example of the symptoms that prevailed in the late 1970s and 1980s that led to the Balkanization of anthropology. The department at which I studied was founded on a premise to fight this Balkanization and promote reintegration of biological and cultural approaches. I'm not a huge Mead "fan" but then I'm not a fan of people trying to take a shit on her legacy either and I cannot see the underlying premise of Freeman's commentary on her work as being anything other than a hatchet job.

I think it was mentioned in the ‘controversies’ section that Freeman interviewed some of the same woman that Mead had. One or more of the females had admitted to Freeman that they had some fun with Mead by exaggerating the things they told Mead at times.Whether that is accurate or not...who knows for sure?

Again, my knowledge regarding Mead is limited (and I got the above from Wikipedia) so take that into account with what I have said.

_________________The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.- misattributed to Alexis De Tocqueville

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